D.R.C.

U.S. officials and the corporate press have agreed to identify the M23 militia as "Congo rebels," despite the 2012 UN report that says M23’s chain of command ends in the office of Rwandan Defense Minister James Kabarebe. This week the U.S. said that it is prepared to lift sanctions on Rwanda if it simply "cuts ties" with M23.

The Security Council’s press release says that this year’s mandate creates the first ever specialized “intervention brigade” to go after militias active in Congo. Friends of the Congo’s Executive Director Maurice Carney says, however, that this is really nothing new, and that he agrees with BK Kumbi, a Congolese woman who managed to interrupt Secretary General General Ban-Ki-Moon's remarks about peace in Congo at a March conference in Geneva.

Imprisoned Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire, in a Kigali courtroomKPFA Evening News Anchor Cameron Jones: Rwanda’s FDU-Inkingi opposition party is reporting that Rwandan police assaulted and/or arrested seventeen of its members last Monday, outside the Supreme Court appeals hearing of their imprisoned leader, Madame Victoire Ingabire. Ingabire attempted to run against incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame, in the 2010 election that many observers, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, described as unfair or as window dressing for military dictatorship. Ingabire was not allowed to register her party or run against Kagame, and she has been incarcerated in Rwanda’s 1930 maximum security prison since October 2010. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has the story.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: Last October Victoire Ingabire was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. She has appealed the conviction, but prosecutors have at the same time appealed for a harsher sentence. They accuse Ingabire, an ethnic Hutu, of conspiring with members of a Hutu militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to destabilize Rwanda. They also accuse her of minimizing the 1994 Rwanda Genocide by asking that all victims, not only Tutsi but also Hutu, be remembered at the Kigali Genocide Memorial.

In 2010, before her arrest, Ingabire told KPFA that she stands for true reconciliation between Rwanda’s Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa ethnicities, and said that media were falsely characterizing her as an ethnic politician, and ignoring her central concern with poverty, and with HIV/AIDS:

Victoire Ingabire (in 2010): Now I see all media. . .they say that I talk only about ethnicity, but that is not true. I talk also about the problem of poverty in our country. I talk about the problem of AIDS.

KPFA: Scholars, including Colgate University Peace and Conflict Studies Professor Susan Thompson and Loyola University Political Science Professor Brian Endless, and Rwanda Genocide survivor and author Paul Rusesabagina have all written that Rwanda’s much lauded economic success has rewarded only an urban elite and left Rwanda’s majority rural peasants in extreme poverty. And, they say, this success has been largely achieved by illegal extraction of neighboring D.R. Congo’s vast mineral wealth.

FDU-Inkingi Treasurer Alice Muhirwa, in RwandaKPFA spoke to Alice Muhirwa, the FDU-Inkingi Party Treasurer, in Rwanda, who said that she had been able to enter the Rwandan Supreme Courtroom for the appeals hearing on Monday, and that those arrested or beaten before they could enter had not been been demonstrating, but that Victoire Ingabire’s supporters all wear name tags, bracelets, or pink ties, the color of Rwandan prison uniforms, to court, to demonstrate their support for her.

Alice Muhirwa: People, all supporters of Madame Ingabire Victoire, all the time have something showing that they are really supporting. Either we had pink ties, or some written thing, so it was not a kind of demonstration. We had some name tags and bracelets. I don’t think that they arrested them because of those bracelets, because I was wearing one and I was inside the courtroom. It seems that they organized themselves just to . . . to intimidate or pressure against people who will try to come and support Madame Victoire.

Milton Allimadi tells KPFA that he doesn't believe this LRA story any more than he did four years ago, when he didn't believe it for one minute. And says that John Prendergast and General Museveni probably wrote the February 15th wire story about Congolese troops joining Ugandan troops to hunt Kony and the LRA, so as to make it look like things are now OK between Uganda and Congo and both are searching for a common enemy.

KPFA News Anchor Cameron Jones: An AP newswire posted to outlets all over the world today said that the Democratic Republic of the Congo has sent 500 troops to join a Uganda-led military effort to hunt down Joseph Kony, the fugitive head of the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA rebel group, bringing the number of African soldiers deployed against the LRA up to 3,350, assisted by U.S. Special Forces. KPFA has, for the past three years, broadcast the voices of journalists, scholars, and anti-war activists, including Black Star News Editor Milton Allimadi, Friends of the Congo Executive Director Maurice Carney, and journalist Keith Harmon Snow, who say that the hunt for the LRA is really a hunt for East and Central African oil. KPFA’s Ann Garrison filed this report.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: Ugandan American Black Star News Editor Milton Allimadi said that the fraudulent nature of the U.S.-backed hunt for Joseph Kony and the LRA hasn’t changed since he said this on KPFA in late 2010:.

Milton Allimadi: I don't buy this LRA business, not for one minute. The United States is not interested in going after the LRA. If the Ugandan government, which is familiar with the terrain, could not defeat the LRA in 24 years of conflict, what added dimension can the United States bring to this? We already saw one disastrous instance, in December 2008, using U.S. logistical support and intelligence, the Ugandan Army attacked the LRA camp at Garamba, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the consequences were just disastrous. They failed to get the key leaders of the LRA and instead provoked massacres of innocent Congolese civilians. Who knows who did the killings, whether it was the LRA or the Ugandan troops? It was a massive disaster.

KPFA: Allimadi, like many other Africa scholars, has always said that the U.S. hunt for Joseph Kony is a fraud designed to secure East and Central African oil for U.S. and other Western interests.

Though not reachable by phone today, Allimadi sent KPFA a message saying that, QUOTE, “These troops are not going to hunt for anything.....except maybe natural resource loot. John Prendergast and General Museveni probably wrote that news wire together, to make it look like things are now "normal" between Uganda and Congo and both are searching for "common enemy," UNQUOTE.

In 2012, the UN Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo produced a report saying that the M23 militia which had resumed the war for control of the resource rich eastern Congo was backed by Uganda and Rwanda and that its top officers even reported to top defense and security officials in Uganda, but the UN Security Council, heavily influenced by UN Ambassador Susan Rice, has refused to sanction officials of both countries. Both are longstanding U.S. allies and, quote unquote, "military partners."